Down the Ladder of Depravity - by Anthony Esolen

In Crisis

Shall we allow sharp dealing, or not?  That’s one of the questions that Cicero takes up in his wise and noble work, De officiis (On Moral Duties).  One side, represented by the philosopher Antipater, holds that you are in the clear so long as you don’t actually tell a lie about what you are selling.  Caveat emptor: it’s the buyer’s business to look into these things.  If you are selling a house that you know is structurally compromised, you needn’t say anything about that, unless the prospective buyer inquires.  But Cicero holds with the other side, represented by the Stoic, Panaetius.  To fail to tell the buyer of something which you know quite well concerns him is to sever the bond between men; it is to strike at the brotherhood of all human beings.  Therefore you are obligated to be candid and forthright.

Yet there’s another reason why you should be candid, and it opens up what moral philosophy is really about: the development of those habits that distinguish a virtuous person.  Cicero observes that nobody, not even thieves, actually likes to deal with people who are sly, underhand, and full of plots.  Even people who are not forthright do not want the reputation of a double-dealer.  If it were not for candor, hypocrisy itself would be to no effect.  We come to a quick answer to our question, not when we ask, “Is this action permissible?” but “Do I want to be known as the sort of person who behaves in this way?”

And make no doubt about it, the evil action strikes first and most keenly at the agent.  The knife turns back upon the mugger.  The trap snatches the trapper.  The engineer is hoist with his own petard.  We cannot make our beds in corruption and rise from them as white as snow.  Instead the evil will grow like a cancer and spread its tendrils about the rest of our moral lives.

I suppose we can construct a ladder of moral descent, thus.  Let stealing be the evil in question:

Stealing is wicked, and those who engage in it destroy themselves within.

Stealing is wrong.  (That’s one step below the fullness of moral vision.  It is detached from the drama of personal being.)

Stealing is impermissible.  (Another step down.  The claim is a weak negative, and is open to further question.)

Stealing is bad, but I am not really stealing.  (A tip-toeing refusal to examine one’s actions with frank honesty.)

Stealing is bad, but there are circumstances in my case that overrule the moral law.  (A rationalization, an excuse.)

Stealing is bad, and I know it, but I am going to do it anyway.  (Over the threshold of grave sin.)

Stealing is bad for other people, but it is good for me.  (Adding idolatry now to the theft.)

Stealing is not necessarily bad, because nobody can tell what is bad.  (The intellect itself has begun to collapse.)

Stealing is sometimes bad but sometimes good.  (The threshold of depravity.)

Stealing is good.  (Over the threshold.  The person who believes such a thing is bent: depraved.)

The man who says, “Stealing is good,” and who believes it and acts upon it, is ravaged with a moral disease.  Just as we see the effects of a dreadful cancer in sick organs scattered throughout the body, so moral depravity soils almost everything that the sufferer touches.  We can sometimes judge the evil of one act by noticing the other evils to which its proponents fall.  We won’t be surprised to find that the man who would rob you blind will also lie under oath, will break a promise, or will forge a signature.  If stealing someone’s property is fine, why not burn it down and have done with it?  Or if it is good and praiseworthy to steal from a man, why not gain all the glory and steal from a nation, or steal a nation itself?

Change the sin from theft to fornication or sodomy or abortion.  Go all the way down the ladder.  We are not now saying, “I know it is wrong to do the child-making thing outside of marriage, but there are special circumstances in my case.”  We are saying, “It is good, it is praiseworthy, it is a blessing, to fornicate.  Everyone should, as often as they can.”  What other evils will we find such people promoting?  What other organs will be shot through with cancer?

Here’s an example of that form of depravity.  It’s from a recent article, by a self-styled libertarian, on three methods for persuading a woman to abort the child you’ve begotten in her womb (boldface and asterisks mine):

Let’s face it: sexually active people have accidents.  S*** happens, that’s life. But we know that men have no reproductive rights in opting out of a being a parent.  With only two birth control options available to men (a condom and a vasectomy) the words you use to get your girl off the fence about having an abortion must be well thought out.  If you are not ready to be a father, the following arguments may help you convince a girl to get an abortion.  The first two methods I describe below have worked for me in separate instances for the two abortions I have paid for.  I know other guys who simply did not say the right things or trusted her to “make the right decision.”  Well, now they are stuck paying child support for children they barely see.

The first method is most applicable for a girl who is a long term booty call or girlfriend; basically, a girl who believes there is an emotional element to your sexual relationship.  For these situations I recommend the “Hail Mary,” a term referring to the end of an American football game when a team attempts a difficult play in a last ditch effort to win.

You need to bring up the subject of abortion with every ounce of verbal finesse and situation-appropriate sensitivity.  You should sound as sincere as possible and tell her that you want her to be the mother of your children one day, but that now is not the right time to start a family.  Explain [sic] you want to wait until you are further along in your career/life goals and you can afford to give your future family all the comforts of life you cannot deliver today.  Finally, explain [sic] if she has the abortion now, you will be able to plan your lives together so that everything is [sic] perfect.  Then, after she agrees and has the abortion, dump her.  It’s called a “hail mary” [sic] in part because of its difficulty to execute, so if you stay with her post-abortion and she becomes pregnant again you’re really f*****.

Where to begin?  Or why begin at all?  The writer recommends shameless lying.  Is that a surprise?  Isn’t fornication itself, even for the mildest of people, all tangled up in evasions, demurrals, half-promises, and lies?  The writer uses girls for his pleasure, but despises them.  They are his toys, and when you’re sick of a toy, you throw it away.  Is that a surprise?  And if the perfectly predictable result of the child-making thing occurs, and they make a child, his one thought is how to persuade her to throw it away, too.  Why not?  It is an accident (a piano falling upon your head from the tenth story of a tenement, that is an accident; begetting a child by the child-making thing is not), or it is s*** (which must be disposed of).  No care for her sorrow or her health; no care for the child; no moral qualms at all.

When we find someone loudly affirming the goodness of something wicked, our first step should not be to try to persuade him otherwise.  That would be to aim at but one tentacle of the cancer.  The treatment must reach much farther down to the roots.  But for the sake of everyone else within earshot, and for our own sanity, we should look to the nearby organs.  You defend pornography, do you?  Then be honest.  Do you not also defend legal prostitution?  Group sex, or any sexual escapades among consenting adults?  Polygamy, for those who want it?  Sexual experimentation among teenagers, so long as it makes a pretense of epidermal hygiene?  Easy divorce?  Abortion?

Jack Kevorkian did not only affirm the goodness of suicide.  He was himself a murderer.  His paintings were sufficient to lead any sane person to conclude that he was profoundly evil, or mentally deranged, or both—for evil is itself a derangement.  The media could have sunk him into the public’s contempt if they had only publicized those paintings, or probed the other cancerous organs in that man’s moral psyche.  They did not.  They chose instead to bracket the one cause, assisted suicide, and ignore everything else.  That plays into the devil’s hands.

We must not do so.

A Estrutura Moral da Pedofilia ( e outros abusos) - por Anthony Esolen

30 Setembro, 2013  

(Tradução de Filipe Avillez)

Na América contemporânea a condenação da pedofilia tem por base as emoções e não o raciocínio moral. Não há quem consiga explicar porque é que a pedofilia é uma coisa tão vil e, ao mesmo tempo, sustentar o primeiro mandamento da revolução sexual: Satisfazei os vossos desejos.

A estrutura moral da pedofilia é tão simples como isto: o bem-estar das crianças subordina-se à satisfação sexual dos adultos.

Jerry Sandusky, ex-coordenador defensivo da equipa de futebol Americano Penn State, criou uma IPSS chamada The Second Mile, para crianças, a maior parte das quais sem pais, que viviam em lares difíceis. Não se sabe se o fez com a intenção de atrair os rapazes para uma armadilha, mas a realidade acabou por ser essa, de acordo com o testemunho de homens que recordaram, com vergonha e nojo, a forma como foram iniciados à sodomia.

Raymond Lahey, o bispo católico emérito de Antigonish, foi detido no aeroporto de Otava depois de o seu computador ter sido verificado no aeroporto. Continha fotografias de rapazes nus. Humilhado, Lahey resignou. A imprensa canadiana tentou esconder o sexo das crianças e suprimiu a informação sobre os destinos exóticos para os quais o bispo costumava viajar. Não se deve perscrutar com demasiada atenção as agências de viagens que ganham bom dinheiro a transportar homens para locais como a Tailândia, que está cheia de rapazes prostitutos. E raparigas também; ao que parece a Tailândia é também um local de eleição para homens de negócios coreanos.

Devíamos agradecer o facto de os Sanduskys e Laheys ainda serem considerados monstruosos. Mas na América contemporânea essa condenação assenta nas emoções e não no raciocínio moral. Não há quem consiga explicar porque é que a pedofilia é uma coisa tão vil e, ao mesmo tempo, sustentar o primeiro mandamento da revolução sexual: Satisfazei os vossos desejos.

Pode-se argumentar que os rapazes eram demasiado novos para dar verdadeiro consentimento. Foram enganados. Isso pode ser verdade para os miúdos no Pennsylvania, mas não dos meninos de rua de Banguecoque. Mas o horror, o nojo, não se coaduna com alguém que tenha simplesmente sido enganado. Se alguém engana um rapaz, vendendo-lhe um pedaço de carvão por 50 euros, o rapaz, mais tarde, olhará para trás com irritação e desprezo pela pessoa que o enganou, mas não com horror. A vergonha das vítimas de Sandusky não deriva do facto de terem sido enganados, mas do acto que foram obrigados a praticar.

Para além disso, o facto de as crianças não poderem dar verdadeiramente consentimento não é, por si, moralmente decisivo. Obrigamos as crianças a fazer uma série de coisas para o seu bem – ou para o que dizemos ser o seu bem. Uma professora de escola pública em Toronto elaborou uma série de aulas em que se pede às crianças que imaginem usar roupas apropriadas para o sexo oposto. Foi louvado, não pelos pais desconfiados, mas pela direcção, que insiste que os professores são “co-pais”. O que ele está a fazer, como é evidente, é sujeitar crianças ingénuas a um exercício que promove os seus próprios objectivos sexuais.

O que enoja as pessoas não é como Sandusky e Lahey fizeram o que fizeram, nem as circunstâncias em que tal aconteceu. É o que eles fizeram – mas parece que ninguém o quer reconhecer.

A razão pela relutância torna-se clara se tivermos em conta a estrutura moral da pedofilia. A satisfação sexual é que vale. Graças a Deus que por agora não existem muitos homens sexualmente atraídos por crianças. Neste caso, levantamos a voz pelas crianças. Mas é o único. 

Se alterássemos a questão, e em vez de perguntarmos quantas pessoas já abusaram sexualmente de crianças, perguntássemos quantas pessoas já fizeram coisas de natureza sexual que resultaram no sofrimento de  crianças, então talvez chegássemos à conclusão que a única coisa que separa milhões de pessoas de Jerry Sandusky é a inclinação. Tudo o que outrora foi considerado uma aberração sexual é, hoje em dia, aplaudido. Tudo, sem excepção, tem servido para ferir crianças, e muito.

Podemos apontar o dedo ao divórcio. A não ser que seja necessário para tirar do caminho do perigo físico e moral um dos adultos e as crianças, então devemos adoptar a sabedoria antiga em relação ao divórcio. Os pais dirão: “Os meus filhos nunca serão felizes a não ser que eu seja feliz”, mas não deviam carregar as suas almas com tamanho narcisismo. As crianças precisam de pais que as amam, não de pais que sejam felizes; são demasiado novas para que se lhes peça que dêem a vida por outra pessoa. Não cabe aos filhos sofrer para benefícios dos pais, antes cabe aos pais suportar, tirar o melhor proveito de uma situação má, engolir o orgulho e dobrar o joelho para bem do filho.

Podemos apontar os filhos nascidos fora do casamento. A criança tem direito a mais do que entrar num quarto decorado com presentes. Ela deve entrar num mundo humano, numa história, num povo. Devia poder nascer numa família com mãe e pai, entre tios e tias, primos e avós, com longas raízes, cheia de histórias interligadas, com a sua reflectida em todos esses espelhos de relação, para não falar nos seus olhos, o seu cabelo, os talentos na ponta dos dedos e a esperteza da sua mente. Esta pertença a um mundo grande e fiável apenas pode ser assegurada no contexto do amor permanente da sua mãe e do seu pai, declarada por uma promessa, diante da comunidade e diante daquele em quem não existe sombra de mudança.

A maioria dos pais fica reticente quando chega a altura de falar de sexo aos seus filhos. Essa reticencia é justa e natural, como é o baixar do tom de voz de um homem quando conduz o seu filho a um lugar sagrado, o túmulo do seu avô que morreu na guerra, ou a pequena e antiga casa onde nasceu a sua avó. O sexo não é uma questão de mecânica. Os pais devem falar do amor que o gerou, e por isso o sexo é também sobre o passado, o presente e o futuro, e sobre todos os que partilham essa grande rede familiar de geração e de amor.

Mas depois entrou em cena a Planned Predators, com a sua multidão de – que lhes havemos de chamar? O que lhes chamaríamos se não tivessem “credenciais” e títulos antes dos nomes? O que chamaríamos ao velho que vive no fundo da rua, que gosta de mostrar fotografias de pessoas a masturbarem-se a criancinhas, enquanto se ri e tosse? Creio que o termo técnico é “depravado”. Mas lá entrou em cena a Planned Predators, com os seus depravados, entusiasmadamente a introduzir as crianças às maravilhas do sexo sem sentido, com bonecos de pénises e vaginas falantes, desenhos de uma menina dobrada a inspeccionar o seu ânus ao espelho, ou de um menino no quarto a abusar de si mesmo.

Estaremos a ser injustos? Algumas pessoas gostam de ter as suas aventuras sexuais, mas são suficientemente discretas para as manter afastadas das crianças; não que o consigam sempre, mas pelo menos na sua hipocrisia pagam o tributo do vício à virtude. Mas a Planned Predators não acredita nesse tributo. Há pedófilos do corpo e pedófilos da alma. A Planned Predators alista, alegremente, os últimos nas suas fileiras.

Perguntamos como é que Sandusky conseguiu fazer o que fez durante tanto tempo, sem ser apanhado pelos pais. Pois bem, o abusador separa a criança dos seus pais. “Este é o nosso segredo”, diz o depravado. “Não contes aos teus pais”, sibila o lagarto. “Eles não vão perceber”. “Os teus pais têm-te tratado mal”, sussurra a cobra. “Os teus pais são antiquados. Os teus pais são egoístas. Os teus pais têm a sua própria agenda. Não tens de te submeter aos teus pais. Podes ser a tua própria pessoa”, denuncia a doninha, querendo dizer: Submete-te a mim.

Essa é a mesma estratégia utilizada pelos pederastas espirituis credenciados. Os pais são o inimigo. Os pais são mantidos à distância. Os pais são demasiado obscurantistas para saber o que é melhor. Os pais – mesmo os pais esporadicamente responsáveis que a nossa geração produziu – não podem saber quão felizes são os que são sexualmente livres.

Começamos então a questionar se o que conta não é o mal infligido sobre a criança mas, neste mundo em que a publicidade é confundida com verdade, a forma com que se reveste, ou a classe a que pertence o destruídor de infância. Para quem não pensa na essência das coisas, é difícil julgar acções e não actores.

Daí que o velho treinador de futebol é justamente condenado por abusar dos seus desportistas, mas o Jimmy Saville, menino bonito da BBC, exibe a sua imoralidade durante anos, perante as brincadeiras de jornalistas que se recusam a divulgar o que sabem. Daí que Kermit Gosnell, um homem com os valores morais de Josef Mengele mas sem o mesmo jeito médico se espanta ao descobrir que muitos imoralistas exprimem agora repulsa por ele ter transformado o aborto em algo mais que uma fonte de rendimentos: um hobby, um tesouro de pedaços desmembrados, decepados dos seus donos ao som de tesouradas.

 Afinal de contas, como é que aquilo que ele faz aos bebés difere em mais do que estilo daquilo que a aprumada médica feminista faz na zona mais chique da cidade? Ele ri-se enquanto trabalha, ela adopta o ar sério de um soldado no exército da igualdade, a cumprir o seu dever, e a ganhar dinheiro enquanto o faz.

E a mãe que vive de subsídios, quando perde a cabeça, chega o cinto ao couro do rapaz que já tem tamanho para a atirar ao chão, com os seus dedos manchados de tabaco e a voz rouca de cansaço. Mas a sofisticada “mãe solteira”, com o seu curso em Estudos Femininos de Wellesley, a viver na zona chique de Boston, veste a sua filha como se fosse assexuada e ignora quando a criança suplica para ser tratada como uma menina normal. Para ela não haverá pena de prisão, mas antes uma data para dar uma conferência na biblioteca local uma semana depois da sua amiga que vai falar sobre a crueldade de se tratar cães como se não fossem cães e uma semana antes de outra amiga falar sobrem os benefícios do trigo sem glúten e ovos sem gema.

John Williamson, confesso adepto do swing e dono de uma gigantesca colónia para nudistas e adúlteros recebe da imprensa nacional um obituário digno de um grande artista e inventor, e ninguém pára para pensar quantas vidas de crianças foram eliminadas ou tornadas miseráveis pelas perversões dos seus pais; mas o Papa emérito Bento XVI, o calmo e sereno professor de moral que até há pouco tempo limitava-se a ser aturado por todos, cujo único pecado foi chamar pecado ao pecado, apenas pode desejar ser tratado com neutralidade aborrecida, ou até inimizade respeitosa. Estilo, homem, estilo.

Why We Should Respect Someone Else’s Conscience - by Anthony Esolen

In Crisis 

The scene is from C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.  The callow young sociology professor, Mark Studdock, an atheist and a social climber, has been detained in a cubicle deliberately fashioned with odd annoying angles and not-quite-right pictures on the wall.  His detainers aim to break down in him any last sense of the inner harmony between beauty and the moral good, or even between ordinary presentability and decency.  The fight is for the man’s soul.

His instructor presents him with a crucifix and asks him to tread upon it.  It’s a meaningless act, he says.  It isn’t a man, only a cheap piece of carved wood.  There is no moral import to it.  But something in the young man recoils.  He does not believe there was anything special about Jesus.  As far as he knows, Jesus was only a man condemned to a shameful death by his enemies, on a trumped-up political charge.  And all of Jesus’ friends abandoned him on Calvary, and all of the intellectual people that matter to him in England have long abandoned him too.  But for that very reason, to tread upon the crucifix seems base.  Why add that last small act of shaming to all the rest?  The still small voice speaks to him, saying, “This would be foul, petty, ignoble.  You must not do this.”  If he complies, as far as he knows, his career is made.  If he refuses, his career is shot.  He’s a married man, and he’s ambitious, and he needs the money.  It’s only a piece of wood.  The meaning of his life hangs in the balance.  Nor can we ever be sure that a man who betrays so clear a prohibition issued by his conscience will be given that choice again, to undo the evil.

He refuses.

These days in our political and even ecclesiastical battles we hear a great deal about the primacy of the conscience, but almost nothing about what the conscience is and why we should care, not about our own conscience, but about someone else’s.  Robert George, in his new book Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism (ISI Books), aims to supply the lack.  He reminds us that conscience is, to use Newman’s words, a “stern monitor,” not, as David Hume asserts, much to the comfort of adolescents everywhere, the ratiocinative faculty by which we construct “justifications” for what we wanted to do (or to get out of doing) in the first place.  Rather, the conscience warns us of what we must do and of what we must not do.  “The duty to follow conscience,” George writes, “is a duty to do things or refrain from doing things not because one wants to follow one’s duty but even if one strongly does not want to follow it.  The right of conscience is a right to do what one judges oneself to be under obligation to do, whether one welcomes the obligation or must overcome strong aversion to fulfill it.”

In other words, as George notes, conscience is not a “permissions department.”   It commands and proscribes; and that’s why we spend so much effort trying to circumvent it, muddle it, or stifle it altogether.  Mark Twain gives us a humorous instance of it when Huck Finn must decide whether to rat on the runaway slave Jim or to protect him.  Huck “knows,” in an exterior way, from common chatter, that the “right” thing to do would be to betray his friend and profit by it, but something deep inside him tells him no, and so he too refuses, even though he figures that he’ll probably end up in hell for it.

 

When someone says, “I may do this, because my conscience doesn’t forbid me,” he is treating an absence as a presence.  He feels no command or proscription, and transmutes that insensibility into a proof that what he wants is permissible.  But that doesn’t follow.  It may be morally permissible; it may be downright virtuous; but it may be wicked.  Many an SS officer’s conscience was comfortably silent on the issue of slaughtering Jews.  People steeped in evil may even hug themselves for the benefits their evil confers upon mankind.  So it is that snuffing out the lives of unborn children, in the minds of some, is more than permissible: it is a great and glorious good, to be celebrated with cake and icing.  Conscience can be unformed or deformed; conscience does not determine what is good or evil, but must hearken to the truth of the matter, even if the person cannot articulate just why he must do what he would prefer to leave undone, or why he must not do what he would dearly like to do.

We are not obliged to respect a man’s permission slips.  We are not obliged to throw the hedonist his party.  We are not obliged to buy the adolescent’s toys, or even to stock our shelves with them.  Indeed, when someone asserts that he ought to be allowed to do something because he wants to do it, and because he doesn’t hear the voice of conscience warning against it—he wants to use cocaine, he and his enemy want to engage in a duel, he likes pornography—we needn’t give much standing to his feelings.  His permission slip puts the matter on the table, that’s all.  We need to ask about the nature of what he wants, whether it is indeed morally neutral, or virtuous, or vicious, whether allowing it conduces to the common good.  But it is a different matter entirely when that man’s monitor does speak, “Thou shalt!” and “Thou shalt not!”

Why is that?  Is it because then his preferences or repugnancies are especially strong?  Your dog may have a strong desire to snitch food from a guest’s plate, but we aren’t overriding his conscience when we keep him from doing it.  He may have a strong aversion against going outside in the pouring rain to do his business, but we aren’t shackling his moral sensibility when we make him go out anyway.  That’s because the dog is not a moral agent.  He does not apprehend the good and internalize it, making it his own, allowing it to inform his choices, to build his personality.  We might say that he knows “rules” but not law.

But man is a moral agent.  That isn’t just something accidental to man, as for instance that he has five fingers on a hand and not six.  It is essential to his being.  It isn’t just Christians who believe that.  All the great pagans did also.  It’s why the poet Hesiod says that the Muses, daughters of Zeus, grant to the man they favor the wisdom to craft straight judgments—we might say beautiful judgments, right verdicts—and the eloquence to persuade others of their rightness.

To forbid someone to do what his conscience commands him to do, or, worse still, to compel him to do what his conscience instructs him he must not do, is thus to work violence upon him at the core of his being.  It is not the same as when we restrain people from the evils that their consciences, dormant, silent, do not tell them they must not do, or when, more rarely and with a heavier burden of justification upon us, we compel them to do something which their consciences do not tell them they must do.  For then we are not violating an express decree of the conscience; we are supplying the lack of one.  We may even, but most rarely and with an extraordinarily heavy burden of justification, overrule another man’s conscience, not by compelling him, but by taking the reins ourselves and doing what he will not do; that’s the case when we give blood transfusions to infants in imminent danger of death, over the wishes of parents who object.

But no man has the right to require another to be less than a man, to demote him to the status of a non-moral agent, like a beast, or a cog in a machine.  No man may steal my humanity, by demanding treason against that stern monitor, my conscience.  But this is exactly what is happening before our eyes, in what used to be a free country.  We are demanding obeisance to and participation in things that until eleven o’clock last night almost everyone (and all Christians and observant Jews) believed to be evil, and believed it with strong reasons prescinding from the nature of man and from revelation.

The “enemies of conscience,” as Professor George calls them, simultaneously and incoherently deny the existence of moral truths that bind the conscience—other people’s consciences, while they reserve for themselves a moral right to bind and loose those other people, mechanically, pragmatically, to bring about some vague ideal society.  In such a world, everyone is a god or an ant, but not a man.  More to follow.

Dan Brown’s Infernal Fiction - by Anthony Esolen

In CWR

“That Mickey Spillane, he sure can write!” says one of the amiable losers in the film Marty, after reading a passage of exquisitely bad macho-romance. 

Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, having written what for lack of a mightier term we must call a novel, a novel that proved that John the Apostle was a girl, Mary Magdalene a helpless goddess, and a hypotenuse an African water buffalo—having revealed for millions the lavish colors of the frescoes in Notre Dame de Paris (there are no frescoes in Notre Dame de Paris), the grim austerity of Spanish Cathedrals (Spanish Cathedrals are notorious for baroque exuberance), and the deep mystery of the Golden Ratio (every schoolboy knew about the Golden Ratio)—having shown the world that he could write a novel about art, theology, and Christian history while knowing nothing about art, theology, and Christian history, except what he could glean from the covers of matchbooks and obiter dicta from Cher—having shown how much you can do if you do not bother to open an ordinary encyclopedia, this Dan Brown, I say, this man of our time and of no time, has now written a novel about the greatest poet who ever lived, Dante. 

Only it doesn’t have a damned thing to do with Dante, just as The Da Vinci Code didn’t have anything to do with Leonardo.  Dante is just a quick needle used to inject the “story” into the reader’s head.  This time, Mr. Brown has opened a lot of encyclopedias, deluging the reader with 400 pages of material that belongs in Michelin guides to Florence, Venice, and Istanbul, none of it to the point.  Even at that, he gets details wrong as soon as he veers away from something you might find in a guide book, especially when he engages in an exceedingly rare moment of telling us something about Dante’s poem.  He says it was called a Comedy because it was written in the vernacular, “for the masses.”  No, a comedy, according to the medieval definition, was a poem in which a character moves from misery to happiness, regardless of what language it is written in, and there were no “masses” to read it, since books were still costly to produce and scarce.

 

He says that Dante’s Purgatory has nine circles of ascent; no, there are seven, one for each of the deadly sins.  He says that Purgatory is the only way to get from the Inferno to Paradise.  No, it isn’t; nobody but Dante visits Inferno and leaves the place, and plenty of people do not have to ascend the mountain.  Essentially, Dante’s poem is about the resurrection of a human soul, by the grace of God, to turn from the lie of evil to the truth and beauty of goodness.  Brown doesn’t get any of that, because he doesn’t care about any of that. 

What’s this book about?  It’s 462 pages of bad prose.  Portentous sentence fragments.  Italics, for somber emphasis.  J-----, there are childish profanities!  Even childish punctuation?!  Anticlimaxes, a good dollop of Most Favored Bigotry, for sales; one dimensional characters, most of them pallid even in their one dimension, and a message with all the sophistication of Sesame Street. 

What’s that message?  We’re all going to die, die, die a horrible death!  Yes, the world is becoming overpopulated!  Actually, the world’s population is leveling off, but the truth here is not convenient.  That’s because the threatening message is another needle, for injecting the promising message.  What’s that one?  It’s simple.  We all need to let scientists and readers of the New Yorker and other brainiacs to direct human evolution, so that we can break out into a “transhuman” and “posthuman” age.  Who are the enemies?  The Catholic Church (naturally), and all of us perfectly normal people who like to marry and have children.  Shame, shame.  And then, too, we must level some very mild criticism at the Robert Langdons of the world—Brown’s twit of a hero—who don’t like to marry and have children (that’s good), but who might feel just a tiny bit squeamish about mass sterilizations and eugenics (that’s bad).  After all, as Brown reminds us several times, didn’t Dante say that “the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of moral crisis, preserved their neutrality”?  Actually, no, Dante never said anything so stupid.  John F. Kennedy, that poseur, said that Dante said it.  But Dante reserves the worst place in hell for those who return evil for good; and the epitome of them all is Satan, traitor against God, with his wings flapping forever in impotence. 

Let me spoil everything in the book.  For hundreds of pages you are led to believe that there are bad guys running around trying to kill Langdon and the de rigueur Xena Warrior Princess, the pate-burnt Sienna Brooks.  There are no bad guys.  For hundreds of pages you are led to believe that a horrible plague, to wipe out a third of mankind, like the Black Death, is about to be unleashed.  It isn’t.  There is no such plague.  It’s a virus that will make a third of mankind infertile.  For hundreds of pages you are led to believe that the biohazard is in Florence.  It isn’t.  Then Venice.  It isn’t.  It’s in Istanbul.  Page after page, ten watt bulb after ten watt bulb, I’m reminded of dialogue from my childhood: 

“Hold on, old chum!  Let’s look at the riddle again.  What if it isn’t Gotham City?  Might it be – Got’um, Sydney – Sydney Ostralia, the world-renowned microbiologist?”

“Holy homonyms, Batman!”

And what about the madman who concocted the virus, one Bertrand Zobrist?  Well, he is really a lover of mankind, don’t you see?  He wants to give mankind enough breathing space—because we are about to enter hell.  What is hell?  Not the loss of God.  Hell is other people—lots and lots of other people, with their garlicky food and their wailing toddlers and their excrement.  Hell is overpopulated Manila, not spiffy New England, where Dan Brown lives.  What is heaven?  Oh, heaven, that’s the brave new world around the bend, when people will be engineered to live longer and not have so many babies, so that they might, well, do whatever they please, apparently, because just as there is no point to a Dan Brown allusion or a Dan Brown metaphor or a Dan Brown travelogue, so there is no point to human existence, either.  We’ll just be nicer, and the fewer of us around to bother about, the nicer it will be.

I’m often taken to task for suggesting that we have been suffering a cultural implosion, for pointing out that an old issue of Boys’ Life is linguistically more sophisticated than the current New York Times.  May I kindly submit Dan Brown as exhibit A in my prosecution?  “That Dan Brown sure is erudite!” say reviewers around the country.  “That Dan Brown, he sure knows his art!  He sure has the goods on the Middle Ages!  His hero is a symbologist – he studies symbs!”  “That Dan Brown knows his science, don’t he!” 

I defy anyone to find for me a best-selling novel written in English before 1950 that is as relentlessly inane and chic-trite and morally destitute as this one.  In saying so, do I also mean to impugn the tastes of his readers?  Let me answer by adapting Dante’s verse over the gates to the lower world: Lasciate intelligenza, voi ch’entrate. 

 

Check your brains at the door, all you who enter!  Check your souls and your humanity, too.

The Vampire School - by Anthony Esolen

In CWR 

“Schools, I hear it argued, would make better sense and be better value as nine-to-five operations or even nine-to-nine ones, working year-round.  We’re not a farming community anymore, I hear, that we need to give kids time off to tend the crops.  This new-world-order schooling would serve dinner, provide evening recreation, offer therapy, medical attention, and a whole range of other services, which would convert the institution into a true synthetic family for children, better than the original one for many poor kids, it is said—and this would level the playing field for the sons and daughters of weak families. 

“Yet it appears to me as a schoolteacher that schools are already a major cause of weak families and weak communities.  They separate parents and children from vital interaction with each other and from true curiosity about each other’s lives.  Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop—then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.”  (John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling) 

One day it struck John Taylor Gatto, Teacher of the Year for New York State in 1991 (and therefore, inevitably, disliked by his administrators), that our schools were not failing.  Rather, they were succeeding fabulously at what they were constructed to do: to produce dull and compliant workers in a technocratic economy.  School, he argued, instills in us a perpetual childish neediness.  We need to toady for grades, because we need to get into the “best” schools, because we need to have a prestigious and well-remunerated job, because we need to buy a lot of stuff to pretend to fill the emptiness of our lives.  Among that stuff will be the odd child or two, who will also need to toady for grades, to get into the “best” schools, and so on, world without end, Amen. 

The Vampire State naturally requires a Vampire School.  Recall the two things everybody needs to know about vampires.  Vampires need blood—a lot of it; and vampires endow their victims with a shadow-life, a kind of immortal death, always dependent upon the vampire.  The Vampire School uses words like “community” and “family” the same way a vampire talks about life, as from a vast distance, with only a vague and twisted memory of the reality of such a thing, long ago. 

Is that too harsh a verdict? 

Someone knocks at your door.  “Hello,” says the fellow, flashing his card.  “My name is John Smith.  I hear you have a twelve-year-old boy here.” 

“Yes, my son Bobby.  Has he gotten into any trouble?”

“Oh no, sir, not yet.  I am simply here to talk to him about sex.”

“I see.”

“Yes, I am licensed by the state and the school district,” he says, flashing another card, “to talk to Bobby about sex.  He is here, perhaps?”  The man elbows his way into the living room, glancing at the titles of the books in your bookcase.

“As a matter of fact, he isn’t.  He’s down by the pond fishing with his little brother.”

“A pond, fishing,” says the man, writing on a notepad.  “Unsupervised fishing at a pond.  Very well.  When may I see him?  My appointments are rapidly filling up.”

“Shouldn’t I first know something about you?” you ask, naively.  “Suppose you don’t believe the same things I believe.”

“My dear sir,” says the man, arching an eyebrow, and smiling ever so slightly, “it is not your place to know anything about me.  If there’s any knowing going on, it will be I who must find things out about you.  But really,” he continues, assuming an academic air, “the subject of sex is as scientific and precise as physics or mathematics, so that what you happen to believe about it is of no more import than what you believe about the composition of the moon, or the area of a circle.  It is a part of my work”—here he lowers his voice to something between a purr and a growl—“to disabuse young people of the prejudices their parents bring to sex.  Now then, when will your son be available?”

You hesitate.  More writing on the notepad.

“Will tomorrow at noon be all right?”

“Tomorrow at three, fine.”

You begin to close the door.  “Not so fast,” says Mr. Smith.  

“There’s the little matter of the fee.”

“You mean you are going to charge me money for this?”

“My dear sir,” he beams, “recall, I am an expert.  You wouldn’t want to do your own plumbing, would you?  No, of course not.  Or prepare your own meals, except under duress?  Or provide your own entertainment?  Play your own musical instruments?  Invent your own sports?  Get together with your own neighbors to play cards?  Build your own garage?  Farm your own land?  Read your own old and musty books, and think about them by yourself?  Make love to your own wife without the aid of expert tips from magazines and pornographic videos?  Worship God with your fellow believers?”

“What’s wrong with that?” you stammer, but he snaps the notebook shut.  “I haven’t all day.  Here is my bill.  I make $50 an hour.  Sixty hours with Bobby should about do it.  If he fails, my colleague Ms. Jones will be available for remedial lessons.  Good day.”

And you give in.

Or perhaps not.  There are some people—homeschoolers most notable among them—who have tried to elude the Vampire altogether, with greater and lesser degrees of success.  But there are others, whose number is Legion, who have been bitten too deeply, and who have come to depend upon the Vampire School.

They secretly look forward to the nine-to-five or nine-to-nine school whose prospect fills Gatto with horror.  They do not want more time with their children.  They hardly know what to do with the time they do have.  They pay, handsomely, for time-consuming activities that relieve them of the responsibility of a real life.  They have been trained to consider all things done with simple independence as beneath an intelligent person’s notice.  “Slavery is freedom,” says Big Brother, who is now also Big Sister.  So a woman will pay to rid herself of her children for certain hours during the day, so that she may work, let us say, as a cook in a local restaurant, to pay for the Vampire and its minions, and for prepared meals from the Vampire Market.

In Free at Last: The Sudbury Valley School, Daniel Greenberg reveals to us not only that the Vampire is a Vampire, but that he is a naked Vampire to boot.  For the Vampire, lending his victims the simulacrum of life, delivers the simulacrum of education, but paradoxically must be seen to “fail” frequently, so as to justify the transfusion of greater and greater quantities of blood.  He can do so only by persuading people that learning how to read and cipher and so forth is so tremendously difficult and unnatural that many children, especially those from poor homes—here he dabs a dry eye with his handkerchief—will never manage it, unless they submit to ever more (and more intrusive) ministrations from the Vampire, who alone knows how to teach, being the expert and all that. 

But Greenberg laughs the Vampire’s pretenses away.  When children are ready to learn a subject, they will learn it.  He tells of a group of his school’s nine-year-olds and twelve-year-olds, who suddenly announced that they wanted to learn arithmetic—all of it.  So he dug up a textbook from 1898, full of examples and exercises, and gave it to them.  Addition took two classes, he says, and subtraction another two.  The children memorized the multiplication tables, then tackled the exercises.  “They were high, all of them,” he says, “sailing along, mastering all the techniques and algorithms.”  Then they went on to long division, fractions, decimals, percentages, and square roots.  “In twenty weeks, after twenty contact hours, they had covered it all,” writes Greenberg, “six years’ worth.” 

And then there is reading.  Consider that a little child learns the most complex thing that most people will ever learn—human language.  He learns it naturally, because he has a hunger to learn it, and he learns it without training by experts, and at no expense at all.  When speaking has been mastered, reading is not all so hard, if the child has things to read.  These days, it is almost impossible to avoid things to read.  Most of it is junk, but then, so is most of what is assigned as reading in school.  So what are we paying all that money for?  To ensure, perhaps, that children associate reading with drudgery?

 

Can a vampire be reformed?  In a manner of speaking, yes: with a stake.

The Vampire State - by Anthony Esolen

In CWR

 Just loosen your collar—this will all be over in a moment

“They live in the northernmost community in Canada,” said the fellow at the hamburger joint. “They’re Inuit, and have been living there for more than 2,000 years. They used to follow the caribou herds from place to place, but the government has settled them down, and now they have a permanent village, with the houses built up high, above the permafrost.” 

He then told me that the government had given them a quota for fishing turbot, and if they fell short of the quota, the government would make up for the shortfall by a cash grant. Until recently, they’ve attached themselves to international fishing expeditions, but now they have purchased a ship of their own. That was why they had flown the 4,000 miles from the 15th parallel to our island on the 46th—to take possession of the ship. The cost of the ship was borne by the government. I don’t know whether the $20,000 for four round-trip plane tickets was also borne by the government—that is to say, by other people, with the government middlemen taking their substantial cut—but it wouldn’t surprise me. 

“I suppose,” I said, “that living in such a forbidding place, they don’t have the social problems they have in, say, Yellowknife,” the capital of the Northwest Territories, notorious for alcoholism and family breakdown. My reasoning was simple. You can’t survive from one year to the next unless you preserve moral order. 

“No, they have the same problems there that they have all over the Territories,” he replied, and he put the blame squarely on Ottawa. “Paternalistic” was the word he used. 

The conversation caused me to consider what a place like Yellowknife has in common with, say, Detroit. Yellowknife is a small town on the Great Slave Lake, in the midst of the richest mineral deposits on Earth. It is, for all that, a deeply dysfunctional place. Detroit used to be the jewel of the Great Lakes, the auto capital of the world. It is now a pit of crime. Whole neighborhoods have been abandoned. The current mayor, Dave Bing, has ordered some of them to be plowed under, to turn them back to grasslands, perhaps for pasturing sheep. 

It’s not just Detroit, and money alone is not the problem. A good friend of mine used to tell me stories of growing up in Philadelphia after the war. His family was poor, but so was everybody else’s in the neighborhood. The streets were safe. He and his friends would often jump a train on the Main Line, just to hang around one of the outlying towns for a day, and then come back at suppertime, and nobody thought anything of it. People used to wonder how the economist Thomas Sowell could have attained such prestige, having grown up in Harlem; but he would tell them that when he was a boy, Harlem was a pretty good place for children, and the schools were solid. The teachers knew their subjects, and insisted on good behavior. And families were mostly intact. 

I don’t suggest that there is only one cause to explain what happened to Detroit, Harlem, Yellowknife, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, and so on. I do want to suggest a significant cause and, in a short time, a sufficient cause, which I’ll call the Vampire State. 

The two things to keep in mind about vampires are that they need blood and that they confer a wraith-like immortality upon their victims. It is an inverted symbiosis. Vampire and victim remain alive forever, but it is a death-in-life, dependent upon the consumption of health. 

The Vampire State needs blood. It can never have enough. The deal it cuts with the victim is simple enough. “You are weak,” says the Vampire State. “You are needy. You will soon die. I can help you. I can make you last forever. But you must give me your blood: your initiative, your moral strength, your independence, your manhood and womanhood, your folkways, and your self-government. I have the money—my business with other of my, er, clients. I will give this to you. The gift involves a little transfusion. Kindly loosen your shirt collar, and it will be over in a moment.” 

The Vampire State must have victims, whom it “helps” in this way. Its prime directive is to survive as it is, upon the blood of false charity. The Amish govern themselves, and keep the Vampire State at bay. The Vampire State will encourage none of the habits and the virtues that would make the victims of its benevolence more like the Amish. 

The Amish do not countenance divorce. Their families are strong and, as much as is possible in this vale of tears and sinners, happy. The Vampire State cannot abide strong families. So it seeks to divide man from woman, and woman from child. It will reward women with blood if they bear children out of wedlock; and if those women should be so foolish as to marry, the transfusion ends. “You had better stay single,” whispers the Vampire. “You need what I give you.” 

Vampires have a weird hankering for women. The Vampire is like the eunuch in charge of a great harem of female wraiths. How to build up the harem? The Vampire’s strategy these days is disarmingly simple: promote the independence of women, with great noise and chivalry. Now, most healthy women actually want to marry a good and reliable man, who will provide for them and their children. The Vampire despises such women, and encourages others to despise them too, so that the women themselves will begin to doubt that something may be wrong with them. The Vampire reasons thus. For every woman who goes forth in fierce independence, I will attain two or three who will either never find a completely reliable man, or who will turn to Me for their sustenance. It is a real bargain. And once I have them for a few years, their children will also be mine. Not one step will you take, without my permission or my “support.” 

Healthy people seek solutions to problems. The Vampire seeks problems. The Vampire State must, however, appear to be attacking crime, and will therefore multiply crimes to attack. This it will do in two ways. It will criminalize perfectly ordinary things, like spanking a child or drinking soda; and it will permit and encourage pathological things that help to destroy those institutions that provide for genuine life, genuine community, and genuine law. After it has reduced the churches to rubble, the Vampire expresses astonishment and grave concern when rogues rule the streets; which gives the Vampire cause to “intervene,” with canines. 

I’ve mentioned the churches. The Vampire State will, at times, tolerate the churches, and even appear to encourage them, so long as they remain subservient. But that tolerance is never stable. For there is a deep enmity between the Vampire State and the churches. The reasons are easy to see. The Vampire does evil, and on some level must know it; but the churches uphold an absolute condemnation of evil. The Vampire feeds on weakness; but the churches attempt to perfect the natural virtues by Christian love. The Vampire is gray and ugly and dead; the churches are founts of living water. Not all of them, mind you; the Vampire State has suborned quite a few. But even those can yet repent of their ways. 

The Vampire State, I’ve said, despises ordinary women. It fears ordinary men. An ordinary healthy man might command the respect of his fellows. He might preach a godly self-reliance which is a form of charity for his neighbors. He might wean some people off the dead blood. He might even try to hammer a stake through the Vampire’s heart. The Vampire can’t have that. For the Vampire is an effeminate old cad. His métier is not honest confrontation and clear debate, but subterfuge and seduction. 

So the last thing the Vampire State wants is a lot of strong men around. These days, the Vampire State has conceived the idea of promoting sexual deviance among men. A troop of Boy Scouts is dangerous—to the Vampire; silver bullets and all that. So the Vampire holds parades for men who depend completely upon the Vampire to enforce social approval for their pathologies. 

The Vampire State likes blood. More than one million unborn children in the United States every year shed their blood to keep the Vampire State alive. The Vampire knows well: if human life is sacred, then the sexual union of man and woman, which brings life, must also be sacred. If that union is sacred, then marriage is sacred. If the sanctity of marriage is upheld, then it is possible—just possible—that healthy and independent communities will be born. In such communities, the Vampire is not welcome. No, the Vampire will shed a little tear or two, and then consume the blood. Eventually the Vampire will get around to manufacturing his human victims—when his dependent vampires are sufficiently drained of genuine humanity and life to oppose him. 

What does the all-competent, all-meddling, all-controlling modern state do? Simple to answer. What would the Vampire do?